Warren/Brown III: The Night of Nonsense Liberation

Wednesday night was the third debate up here in Massachusetts between incumbent Senator Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. They debated for an hour. They debated health-care policy. They debated taxes and spending and The Deficit. They debated issues important to women, including abortion and contraception and equal pay for equal work. They debated levels of military spending. They did not spend once blessed second talking about what may or may not have been on Elizabeth Warren's job applications 30 years ago, and they did not descend into an utter waste of time like they did here a week and a half ago sitting down across from David Gregory. Even Brown seemed to realize this debate was serious business, because he passed on his one and only opportunity to cook up the Native-American nothingburger once more. And for this serious business America has to thank a guy named Jim Madigan who works at WGBY-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts. Almost by himself, on Wednesday night, one man kept a race very important to the balance of power in this country from descending into nasty, racially-grating burlesque for the balance of this campaign. I don't think I'm overstating the case at all when I say that, based on their relative performances moderating debates up here, Jim Madigan should be replacing the Dancin' Master this Sunday on Meet The Press.

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(Even with Madigan's work keeping things on an even keel, the crowd in Springfield was just rowdy enough to give the debate a little tang. Some crazed woman kept yelling, "NO!" at Warren while Brown got a resounding bazoo when he tried to claim credit for being "the deciding vote" in the committee that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Warren's creation from the jump.)

Perhaps because the proceedings were liberated from the nonsense, Warren by far had the best night on stage she has had throughout the entire campaign. She was sharp and relaxed and relentlessly on-point, making quite clear that, for all of his professed bipartisanship, Brown has been Republican enough to sign onto Grover Norquist's suicidal no-taxes-of-any-kind pledge, something Brown didn't have to do, and something for which he absolutely has no answer. When Senator McDreamy tried to wriggle away from it, promising out into the cheap seats that he wasn't going to "raise taxes on anyone here in Massachusetts," Warren riposted that, "I think I just heard Senator Brown say he'd signed a pledge to work for Grover Norquist but not for the people of Massachusetts." And, when the subject turned to women's issues, Warren had a moment that, I suspect, people around the Commonwealth (God save it!) are going to be seeing once or twice in television commercials:

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"He had one chance to vote for equal pay for equal work, and he voted no," she said. "He had one chance to vote to mandate that health-insurance companies cover contraception, and he voted no. And he had one chance to vote to put a pro-choice woman on the Supreme Court, and he voted no."

She was even quick enough (finally) to turn Brown's endlessly cited statistics from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Republican hack hatchery for decades, against him. When he again brought up the NFIB's estimate on how many jobs "her" economic plans would cost, she replied, "First of all, that report doesn't even mention my name. It doesn't even mention the president's name, and the NFIB is a group that's endorsed a lot of Republicans and that once referred to Ted Kennedy as 'Public Enemy No. 1.'" Very rarely do you hear the network of wingnut welfare called out so clearly. And the most remarkable moment came early on, when, in a discussion of the Affrodable Care Act, which Brown flatly says he'll vote to repeal, he trotted out the "$700 billion in Medicare cuts" lie, and Warren slapped it down much more effectively than the president did in Denver last week, and linked Brown to Willard Romney in the process.

(Brown was pretty obviously adrift on the entire subject of health care. He was proud of what he was able to help do in Massachusetts, and he insisted that the ACA would undo the Massachusetts plan, a contention that is flatly bizarre. At times, he seemed to be inching toward Romney's own incoherent position — that what works in Massachusetts would be tyranny in Tennessee, or something — before moving on again to the problems with having "Washington" butt into the health-care nirvana that we have wrought up here. It is one of the great ironies of the age that the Republicans cannot find a single, solid position to take on the success of health-care reform in Massachusetts.)

It would be wrong to read too much into Warren's strong showing. Brown did what he came to do, which is to promise not to raise any taxes anywhere on anyone, ever. This is, of course, insane public policy, and it makes him sound more like he's running for state senator again, but it sells very, very well, and if he can use it to deflect Warren's attempts to make national issues important to this race, it will have served its purpose. This will still be a two- or three-point race, either way. Recent polling has shown Warren's unfavorability rating inching northward — endless TV attack ads will do that — but it also has shown that people overwhelmingly blame Brown for the tone of the campaign so far, which undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that he declined to utilize his Injun-spottin' skills on Wednesday night. Maybe it takes a strong hand to turn a campaign back into something positive. Maybe, dammit, it takes a Jim Madigan.